Experience API

Draft

Introduction

According to ADL (retrieved June 2016) “The Experience API (xAPI) is an open source specification that allows you to track any experience (i.e., formal, informal, or operational). xAPI can track reading an article or interacting with an eBook, watching a training video, chatting with a mentor, physiological measures such as heart-rate data, quiz scores, and answer history by question.”. According to a more recent definition (retrieved April 2019), the “Experience API (xAPI) is a technical specification that aims to facilitate the documentation and communication of learning experiences. It specifies a structure to describe learning experiences and defines how these descriptions can be exchanged electronically.”. In more simple terms, the XAPI allows tracking of online student activities in various environments . It stores the data in a special purpose database - a socalled Learning Record Store - from which it then can be retrieved for various purposes, e.g. student monitoring or institutional learning analytics. Expressed with a picture:

Data Flow in xAPI. Source: Experience API

See also:

• Learning Record Store
• Cmi5